The people that complain about mozilla stopping development on thunderbird seem to be the same people that complain about things like firefox moving to WebExtensions, and Firefox changing their UI, and Firefox integrating Pocket.
I don't understand why people are disappointed that Mozilla has stopped actively developing thunderbird - it means it's not going to change. There is an email client that you like, as is, and want to keep using, and you're annoyed because mozilla has promised not to change it?
The security patches are largely from Mozilla's Gecko/SpiderMonkey/Toolkit work. The people who create the patches tend to be Mozilla employees. Looking over the 45.x Thunderbird releases I don't see a single Thunderbird specific security fix. [1]
The team that qualifies and does the release work for Thunderbird are volunteers. I believe that the builds are done on Mozilla hosted hardware.
One might care where the patches come from as a volunteer community could be less reliable over time than the paid Mozilla staff. I know I certainly feel that way.
But if you prefer security updates from paid employees of an organization rather than volunteers, surely a commercial product rather than a free one would be more suitable for your needs?
> One might care where the patches come from as a volunteer community could be less reliable over time than the paid Mozilla staff. I know I certainly feel that way.
The people who are making these complaints are disproportionately those who have no problem using Debian or Arch, so I don't think that's the crux of the issue for them.
Does being maintained count as being actively developed? I think it should. As long as Thunderbird gets security patches, and maybe even the occasional bug fix, I'm happy with it.
I wish more pieces of software would get to the finished state and would slip into maintenance mode.
Probably not. Developers are fickle and few like to do maintenance only work. So even if it's still getting security patches they are likely to be losing the institutional knowledge to continue that in future, not to mention keeping up with things like API changes for gmail integration.
GMail has been pushing for its custom XOAUTH2 authentication for a while, and password-based authentication can result in security warnings. Password-based authentication also doesn't support 2FA.
By the way - the IETF standardised an OAuth2 SASL mechanism (RFC 7628) a couple of years ago, no idea why GMail doesn't support it.
I'm asking which Gmail APIs would Thunderbird have to keep up with. As far as I know, it never used that API, hence it doesn't have to keep up with it.
Basically, the only thing that is kind-of Gmail specific is the auth support (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=849540). If Gmail sometimes in future switches from OAuth2 to some other protocol, the client will have to be updated.
It seems that they have. I just started using Thunderbird again after a number of years and the setup to connect to my gmail account has been simplified to confirming the settings on one page with three auto-filled fields.
That certainly sounds nice but it's not true. Or at the very least depends on how you define software. If software is built upon an evolving platform (such as the web) and has a self-supplying revenue stream if it needs one at all, then it can be done and will last.
Even for embedded software though, if something hasn't been looked at for years then the original developers probably don't remember it and may not still be around. If a client want's a feature or tweak then the institutional knowledge is gone and the best bet would be starting from scratch.
Maybe it's something that is of value to a lot of users and a non-profit (http://www.computerworld.com/article/3011418/web-browsers/mo...) might help move that important software in the future. Like a competitive open-source browser, a competitive mail client is a good thing. Not everyone want to use the cloud.
I don't understand why people are disappointed that Mozilla has stopped actively developing thunderbird - it means it's not going to change. There is an email client that you like, as is, and want to keep using, and you're annoyed because mozilla has promised not to change it?